Economic Foundations for Sustainable Urbanization

Sustainable urbanization requires integrated planning, as it allows cities to come up with a common vision for their development. Lack of integrated action often leads to sub-optimal results and undermines a city’s economy and quality of life. As a result, UN-Habitat promotes the Three Pronged-Approach to achieve sustainable urban development, which is founded on a policy triangle comprised of good governance, urban design and municipal finance. Through this publication, UN-Habitat along with ‘Urban Morphology Institute, Paris’, attempt to show the importance of obtaining parallel results in all the three prongs of urban planning. This publication also sets the basis to select a set of metrics and indicators to measure the components of the Three Pronged-Approach and illustrates how these indicators affect urban productivity. This an amended and expanded second edition (March 2017)